There’s nothing worse than doing a bit of Instagram stalking only to get shut down by the dreaded message…’You need to be following (insert name of person being stalked) in order to like or comment’. Shot down at the first hurdle there champ.

Well fear not creeps, it turns out that plenty of these private pics have been made publicly available due to a blunder on the social media site’s side.

If an Instagram account was set to private but the user posted links to their photos on other social media platforms, those photos became public, meaning they could still be shared by copying their URL.

Instagram publicly claimed that this is deliberate, although they have quickly released a patch to resolve the issue. We’re not buying it Instagram, just admit you were caught with your pants down.